Civil War Paul Collier Summary

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In the article by Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, they statistically describe the argument of greed versus grievance, which tries to understand the motivations of combatants in civil warfare. As I understood it, those who support the greed model believe that combatants perform a cost benefit analysis and take up arms when fighting will better their situations and those who support the grievance model say that combatants are motivated by religious, ethnic, identity and social class grievances. Collier and Hoeffler concluded that the grievance-based explanations of civil war are wrong and that combatants in civil war fight for economic benefit. They make this argument by providing empirical and econometric research. I think that there is a lot …show more content…

Before reading this paper, my definition of ethnicity included ideas of appearance, language, and religion. The authors argue however, that “ethnicity is socially contructed”. Therefore, ethnicity is a product of human action and speech over time meaning that they do not remain constant. My definition can be regarded as ‘everyday primordialism’ and the second a constructivist view. Fearon and Laitin argue that social scientists should be concerned with using ordinary language definitions of terms that can be popularly used. They finally come up with a definition of ethnic groups as “groups larger than a family for which membership is reckoned primarily by descent, is conceptually autonomous and has a conventionally recognized ‘natural history’ as a group.” Although I agree with their premise, I think there are some issues with their description of conceptual autonomy as a defining factor for ethnicity. While F&L agree that “it is an empirical fact that ethnic groups ‘understand themselves’ through contrasts with other ethnic groups,” they don’t recognize that there are no ethnic groups in history that have not defined themselves in opposition to another group. Also they argue that casts and classes are not conceptually autonomous, which is not

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